Talk:Muhammad (disambiguation)
Agent of Byzantium is a so called "fix-up" novel made up of seven stories (not including "Departures (story)") that had been previously published individually. The POD was Muhammad had converted to Christianity and so had not founded Islam. Each story, being published independently, had a reference to this in some way to establish the POD for the reader who may have not read any of the previous stories. Therefore, the reference in "Pillar of Cloud, Pillar of Fire" is of no more significance than any other and should not be highlighted here. ML4E (talk) 21:25, October 28, 2015 (UTC) I was not clear on this. I had regarded "Pillar" as a separate entity as it was not in the first anthology, but I guess it's considered part of AoB proper since it was printed in the second edition. "Departures" isn't because it wasn't collected with the rest and doesn't have Basil in it. That clears it up for me. :Yes the "Pillar" story was written some time after the other Basil stories but is set in the same timeframe and has Basil as the POV. If you look at his article here, you will see that chronologically within the story it would be the third adventure by Basil occurring in 1309 while the first two are 1305 and 1307. The subsequent four stories occur in 1315-1320. This is the other difference with "Departures" since it takes place about 700 years earlier. ML4E (talk) 18:56, October 29, 2015 (UTC) The only Basil stories I have read recently are "Eyes of Argos" (in that War anthology it was first printed in) and "Pillar", but I think I read "Archetypes" in The Way It Wasn't (I think that's the title, it's a book with the cover being Mt. Rushmore where Hitler is in place of Lincoln) back at the Austin, TX library. Eugene's library doesn't have AoB or that other book, so I don't have access to most Basil stories. That may change as the library is in the process of getting a huge block grant to buy more books and videos, but that's a big intra-city issue not relevant to non-Eugenites. If any of the other users of this forum have library trouble like I do, I hope those towns get similar library fortunes soon too.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 23:11, October 28, 2015 (UTC) :I read the Agent collection years ago and then got to "Departures" and "Pillar" later in the Departures collection. I found them entertaining if farfetched. I then borrowed the Agent collection from the Toronto Public Library a few years ago to work on them for this project but lost interest for more recent books. I thought to borrow it again but the only copy has been discarded (sold off as a used book) and there is just a reference library copy available for use in the branch but not available for loan. :Good luck with your system getting a copy. It has been out of print for some time but TR or Turtle Fan found a news item that a number of older Turtledove books including Agent are going to be re-issued. ML4E (talk) 18:56, October 29, 2015 (UTC) ::It's exclusively an e-book now. TR (talk) 20:04, October 29, 2015 (UTC)